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Three in five (61%) cloud migration projects are driven by business leaders, according to the latest research from Rackspace and Vanson Bourne.

The study, which polled 250 IT decision makers and 250 business leaders throughout October, showed plenty of boardroom-centric concerns topping the list for driving cloud adoption. The most popular motivation for migrating to the cloud was reducing IT cost (61%), followed by increased organisational resilience (50%), improved security (38%) and increased agility (38%).

Yet the research also argues a disparity between the boardroom and the server room. Only a third (33%) of IT decision makers polled said they are highly experienced with cloud-based infrastructure, with more than half admitting they looked to a third party for support.

Nothing wrong with that, of course, but Rackspace naturally argues specialist support is key to freeing up employee backlog. With support, businesses were more able to focus on streamlining operations (49%) and making sure operational models fit (48%), while without support businesses focused on making sure they have the right tools (44%) and making sure they have the right skills (42%).

More than half (58%) of those polled said their objectives had been completely met by moving to the cloud, while almost nine in 10 (88%) respondents said their organisation’s business goals were in some way met. 53% of the companies in the survey had used third party support.

“A move to the cloud is now an organisation-wide business activity rather than simply a function of the IT department,” said Darren Norfolk, Rackspace UK managing director. “Whether business leaders understand the practicalities of a cloud migration project or not, there appears to be broad acceptance that it is a ‘platform play’ that they can use to innovate and grow.

“Increased communication across all levels of the business will create new opportunities for the cloud to have a direct impact on the bottom line,” he added.

Recent research from the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) found that overall cloud adoption rate in the UK is now at 84%, with almost four in five (78%) of cloud users having adopted two or more cloud services. Norfolk argues that currently “fewer questions are being asked but plenty is being delivered” in terms of adoption.

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Brian Taptich, the CEO of developer-centric cloud storage provider Bitcasa, has told this publication that Microsoft shuttering its unlimited OneDrive storage policy is “definitely not a failure” and other players in the space are risking a “suicide mission” by competing against the hypervendors on their own terms.

Earlier this week, the Redmond giant announced it was to cap each Office 365 subscriber OneDrive account at 1 TB because some users interpreted the definition ‘unlimited’ to its fullest extent. Some users had entire movie collections in Microsoft’s cloud, with the scales topping 75 TB – or 14,000 times the average customer’s data usage – in extreme cases.

For Bitcasa, this represents a full circle change. This time last year, as Microsoft was opening up its OneDrive service for users to store the entire history of recorded cinema into, Bitcasa was shutting down its own $10 all you can eat plan for a similar reason; there was more than a suspicion of businesses using and abusing individual unlimited accounts.

Taptich said he could “empathise” with Microsoft after making the decision to stop unlimited accounts, but stopped short of saying this was akin to waving the white flag. “This is definitely not a failure or an admission of failure,” he tells CloudTech. “I suspect Microsoft just learned that, however theoretical models may have supported the efficacy of offering unlimited storage of a fixed –and low – fee, in the almost entirely frictionless world of data transfer, the first users who show up to the all you can eat buffet break the model with their unimaginable volumes of data.”

Bitcasa’s move away from unlimited, Taptich argues, was not so much a case of trying to recoup lost money, but trying to shift engineering resources from a black hole. But it wasn’t just a case of making the decision, clicking their fingers and switching over.

The company suspected the unlimited plan wasn’t working as out as early as 2013, but it took until late 2014 to implement it. As Taptich explains: “There were two important reasons to continue offering the service. Because we had grown to over 30 PB of data under management from users across 120 countries, the additional time provided an amazing sandbox to test and refine the scalability and performance of the underlying infrastructure that is now the backbone of our developer-focused platform.”

He adds: “We [also] had a small but passionate user base, and we made the decision to invest in building systems that would provide our users relatively seamless ways to transition to our new tiers or, in some cases, to retrieve their data.”

Taptich argues that, while the past year has not been without its challenges, the company’s biggest struggle has been to stay patient. “Companies like Apple and Google have understood for a number of years that whoever owns the customer data owns the customer, but it’s only in the past 12 months that the balance of the connected – and increasingly mobile – ecosystem has woken up,” he explains. “They are playing catch up, and we have a platform which solves their desire to maintain customer ownership without having to custom build solutions.”

Despite arguing that fighting “trench warfare” with Google, Microsoft, and Amazon is not a smart plan, as the battle to provide public cloud infrastructure is being fought alongside companies with trillions of dollars in market capital, Taptich insists there is an “enormous amount of opportunity” for smaller players long term.

Take enterprise-centric file sync and share vendor Egnyte. While their funding pales in comparison to the likes of Dropbox and Box, their laser focus on enterprise customers, and in particular, picking up second generation enterprise customers, is a viable target.

“You have to realise that we are in the middle of an extraordinary transformation from local, device based resources to remote, cloud based resources,” Taptich explains. “All data will eventually reside remotely, and the speed with which this happens is purely a function of connection speed and ubiquity, and security.

“Whether it takes two years or 20 years, this is a fundamental shift that represents multi-hundreds of billions of dollars,” he adds. “And in the short term, successful companies will be laser focused on providing services which enhance the 11 nines reliability of the public cloud, will be targeting customers with a user base every bit as scaled, and will be building a financial model that benefits from the plummeting costs of underlying public cloud infrastructure.”

At the very least, this is the theory which Bitcasa expects to come true.

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Cloud storage provider Dropbox has launched a new enterprise product, as well as making other announcements at an event in San Francisco.

For those asking the inevitable question of ‘doesn’t Dropbox already have an enterprise product?’, then the answer is yes – Dropbox for Business, which has more than 100,000 users – but this product enhances those features to include new account management tools for greater security.

Among these are a suspended user state option, which allows for greater flexibility when employees leave a company; the ability for team admins to log in to an employee’s account; as well as custom branding capabilities.

“With Dropbox Enterprise, IT can give employees the Dropbox they love while getting the advanced capabilities they need to effectively onboard and manage tens of thousands of users, protect company data, and get the most from their investment,” a company blog post read.

While the statistics associated with Dropbox are impressive – 4,000 edits to documents are made each second, with users syncing 1.2 billion files each day and creating more than 100,000 new shared folders and links each hour – the company continues, despite its best efforts, to trail an image of being more consumer-friendly in the media. This may have a point; research released this week from MobileIron revealed that Dropbox remained among the top banned apps by enterprises – providing precisely no change to figures Fiberlink released back in 2013.

Dropbox CEO Drew Houston vehemently argued the case for his company during the event. According to WIRED, Houston mentioned a competitor – not by name, but by all accounts Box – and argued Dropbox had accrued more business customers across 10 months than Box had during its lifetime.

Other announcements the company made served to beef up its enterprise stake. Dropbox announced it now meets HIPAA and HITECH Act compliance obligations, helping customers that handle Protected Health Information (PHI). Elsewhere, Hewlett Packard Enterprise is to become a premier reseller of Dropbox for Business products. The company officially launched earlier this month, with $53 billion in annual revenue.

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It turns out unlimited does not mean unlimited after all: Microsoft has reneged on its plans to give Office 365 subscribers unlimited OneDrive cloud storage, capping each account at 1 TB.

This is perhaps being a little harsh, and isn’t a particularly egregious rewriting of the English language. Microsoft’s reason for cutting back on OneDrive and its unlimited access, available for just over a year, is that some people are just too greedy for their own good.

“Since we started to roll out unlimited cloud storage to Office 365 consumer subscribers, a small number of users backed up numerous PCs and stored entire movie collections and DVR recordings,” a OneDrive company blog post reads. “In some instances, this exceeded 75 TB per user, or 14,000 times the average.

“Instead of focusing on extreme backup scenarios, we want to remain focused on delivering high-value productivity and collaboration experiences that benefit the majority of OneDrive users,” it adds.

Suffice it to say the news has not gone down well on all sides, with many commenters , notably in the video production and photography industries, raging against the decision. It also makes an interesting comparison with a piece CloudTech published this time last year, criticising Bitcasa for binning its $10 unlimited cloud storage option and praising Microsoft for the opposite. At the time, Bitcasa blamed the shuttering on “abusers”, or in other words businesses using individual storage accounts. Now the tables have turned.

“OneDrive has always been designed to be more than basic file storage and backup,” the company post continues. “These changes are needed to ensure that we can continue to deliver a collaborative, connected, and intelligent service.”

The service is not going away immediately however; users will have a year to move their data over the 1 TB limit elsewhere, while consumers who ‘find that Office 365 no longer meets [their] needs’ will be given a pro-rated refund.

You can find out more here.

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Global cloud traffic will more than quadruple between now and the end of 2019 from 2.1 to 8.6 zettabytes (ZB), according to research from Cisco.

The findings, which appear in the firm’s latest Global Cloud Index study, put a variety of reasons for this explosion in growth, from the continued popularity of public cloud services in the business domain, the increased degree of virtualisation in private clouds, and growth of M2M connections.

A zettabyte is 10 to the power of 21 bytes, approximately equal to a thousand exabytes or a billion terabytes. To put it another way – as Cisco described back in 2011 – an exabyte would have the capacity to hold more than 36,000 years of HD quality video. So theoretically, a zettabyte would be able to hold 36 million years of video. Better make sure you’re comfortable before diving into that particular boxset.

Yet the large numbers don’t stop there. Cisco also predicts the Internet of Everything (IoE) will generate a mind-bending 507.5 ZB per year – 42.3 ZB per month – by 2019. The repositories for the storage of data will continue to change as the years progress, with the networking giant arguing that by 2019, the majority (51%) of stored data will not be on the PC, but on smartphones, tablets, and M2M modules among others.

In terms of global data centre and cloud traffic, annual global data centre IP traffic is projected to reach 10.4 ZB by the end of 2019, up from 3.4 ZB last year. But the strain of the traffic going through the data centres is likely to be mitigated by technologies such as software defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualisation (NFV), Cisco explains. Lower data centre tiers could carry over 40 ZB of traffic per year.

The numbers just keep going up and up; by 2019, consumer cloud storage traffic will be 1.6 gigabytes per user per month, compared to 992 megabytes per month last year. Cisco also predicts that by 2019, 55% of the consumer Internet population – more than two billion users – will be using personal cloud storage, up from 1.1bn in 2014.

These numbers aren’t as explosive, showing both the reach of cloud technologies currently and the potential user base it can still tap into, as Doug Webster, vice president of service provider marketing at Cisco explains.

“The Global Cloud Index highlights the fact that cloud is moving well beyond a regional trend to becoming a mainstream solution globally, with cloud traffic expected to grow more than 30% in every worldwide region over the next five years,” he said.

“Enterprise and government organisations are moving from test cloud environments to trusting clouds with their mission-critical workloads. At the same time, consumers continue to expect on-demand, anytime access to their content and services nearly everywhere,” Webster added. “This creates a tremendous opportunity for cloud operators, which will play an increasingly relevant role in the communications industry ecosystem.”

Of course, we now play the waiting game to see if these exciting predictions come true. Have hope, though, that these targets may even be conservative; in 2011, Cisco argued “today we live in a world of petabytes and exabytes, but we’ll need to add the term zettabyte to our vocabulary by 2015.”

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The good news: all of the UK’s major city councils have disaster recovery (DR) plans in place. The bad news: two in five will not have tested them within the past 12 months.

The figures come amidst a new Freedom of Information (FoI) request from disaster recovery specialists Databarracks, which found that 38% of city councils in the UK’s major cities are not regularly testing their DR systems. Databarracks argues this is more of an issue with public sector organisations; according to the firm’s 2015 Data Health Check, only 21% of large private companies had failed to test their disaster recovery over the past year.

Similarly, there wasn’t a consensus between city councils for recovery time objectives (RTOs); while some bodies could recover their systems within a few hours, others took up to four days.

This relates to previous research conducted by Databarracks which came to a similar conclusion. In May, with the General Election around the corner, the disaster recovery provider argued many councils in London hadn’t tested their systems in at least a year, and again offered wildly fluctuating RTOs for electoral data, ranging from 24 hours to two weeks.

Peter Groucutt, Databarracks managing director, argued the majority of councils were prioritising council tax alongside other business critical functions, which is a good sign – yet it wasn’t that way across the board, with one council’s prioritisation of ‘car parking’ being described as “questionable” by Groucutt.

Groucutt said: “The results of our FoI request exposed that a significant proportion of city councils had not tested plans for over a year, meaning that they cannot be confident in their effectiveness in the event of a genuine crisis.” He added: “It is encouraging to see that all city councils have thorough DR plans in place, but that’s only half the job.

“To guarantee effectiveness, regular DR testing must be performed and plans must be constantly updated.”

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The Oracle OpenWorld 2015 event, which kicked off yesterday in San Francisco, had what one would expect from such a conference; product and integration announcements, alongside a smattering of competitor bashing.

First off, the announcements. Oracle unveiled the Exa Your Power Program, a system which enables customers to migrate off IBM Power systems to Oracle Engineered Systems through Intel technology. The program, which is jointly funded by both Oracle and Intel, offers customers a free proof of concept migration for sample databases, customised reports documenting the migration process and a ‘comprehensive’ roadmap for companies looking to modernise their database environments.

The software giant also announced a record number of partners are adopting Oracle’s cloud technologies, while announcing a new cloud program with Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN). New designations within OPN will first appear on February 1, while a new entry point into the OPN program, the Cloud Registered level, will require no initial investment from organisation looking to grow their business with Oracle’s cloud.

In the keynote speech on Sunday night, Oracle chief technology officer Larry Ellison argued “it seems like early days” for cloud businesses, and added SAP and IBM were no longer on the company’s competitive radar.

“In this new world of cloud computing, everything has changed – almost all of our competitors are new,” he told delegates, adding: “We now compete with Salesforce.com and a new company called Workday. Those are the companies we see most frequently when we are selling applications in the marketplace, and we virtually never, ever see SAP.

“This is a stunning change,” added Ellison. “The largest application company in the world is still SAP, but we never see them in the cloud. We sell a lot of applications in the cloud, but we compete with Salesforce, and Workday, and not SAP.”

IBM was equally dismissed as “nowhere in the cloud”, but Ellison admitted he had respect for how Microsoft has turned around its fortunes. “Microsoft is the only one of our traditional competitors that has crossed the chasm, and is now competing aggressively in the cloud business at all three layers,” the Oracle CTO explained.

Those three layers are, of course, the software and application side, the infrastructure, and the platform layer. “Here’s the irony of it all,” Ellison told the audience. “We went into the SaaS business, and…that required us to be in the platform business. We went into the platform business, and came to understand we had to be in the infrastructure as a service business. That’s how we got to where we are today.”

Regular readers of this publication will recall Oracle’s various attempts to bolster its cloud focus, particularly this time last year when the company was hoovering up executives, from SAP head of cloud Shawn Price to former Google App Engine mastermind Peter Magnusson. Yet IBM and SAP may rankle at the criticism from Ellison; both companies will arguably say their cloud operations are succeeding as well as, if not better, than Oracle’s.

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Yesterday was a pretty busy day if you were tracking financial results, with Amazon, Microsoft and Google all declaring their figures. And it was an impressive showing on the cloud side for the three tech giants, with Microsoft announcing Azure usage and compute usage more than doubling year on year and Amazon Web Services (AWS) showing similar quarterly and yearly growth.

AWS brought in $2.09bn for the firm in Q315, compared with $1.17bn for this time last year, with $5.47bn in the nine months from January 2015. As for Microsoft Azure, the exact figures remain undisclosed, but under Microsoft’s four buckets in which they divulge their revenue, ‘intelligent cloud’ contributed to $5.89bn for the quarter ended September 30 – up from $5.48bn this time last year.

Regarding Google, the specific figures again remained under cloak and dagger, but the company, of course now under the umbrella of parent firm Alphabet, intimated cloud had contributed strong growth. The company also promised, as early as the next quarter, financial results to be more transparent than the usual ‘advertising’ and ‘other’ brackets.

In terms of overall figures, revenue for Amazon was at $25bn for the latest quarter, compared to Microsoft at $20.4bn GAAP for Q116 and Alphabet’s $18.7bn.

Ruth Porat, CFO of Alphabet and Google, said: “Our Q3 results show the strength of Google’s business, particularly in mobile search. With six products now having more than one billion users globally, we’re excited about the opportunities ahead of Google, and across Alphabet.”

Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, said: “We are making strong progress across each of our three ambitions by delivering innovation people love. Customer excitement for new devices, Windows 10, Office 365, and Azure is increasing as we bring together the best Microsoft experiences to empower people to achieve more.”

The cloud infrastructure revenues of each company comparatively makes for interesting reading, with notes from Synergy Research revealing how, while AWS maintains a major lead, Microsoft is finding a niche in second place. Back in July, the latest figures revealed the combined market share of the ‘big four’ – AWS, Microsoft, IBM, and Google – was at 54% of the overall cloud infrastructure market, with quarterly revenues of the four behemoths having surpassed $3 billion for the first time.

John Dinsdale, Synergy chief analyst, told this reporter that the status quo, of Azure revenue growing significantly more rapidly than AWS or IBM, remains – yet AWS will maintain a substantial lead. “Considering the scale of their cloud operations, both AWS and Microsoft are growing at remarkable rates,” he said.

You can find the full Amazon figures here, the Microsoft results here, and the Google announcement here.

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Microsoft and Dell have continued their long-standing partnership by announcing a new “Azure-consistent integrated system for hybrid cloud” at the Dell World event in Texas.

The move is an updated ‘standard’ version of the companies’ ‘Azure in a box’ service announced last year, the Cloud Platform System (CPS). Utilising Dell’s hardware with Microsoft’s software, the two companies argue the platform is the only integrated system with a ‘true’ hybrid cloud experience, from the platform’s consistency with Azure.

CPS Standard, which is shipping immediately with Windows Azure Pack, System Center 2012 R2 and Windows Server 2012 R2, can be set up and running in three hours, according to the companies. Other features included with the platform include with a modular design, enabling customers to scale from four to 16 nodes based on business need, as well as a simplified business continuity and failover process.

“Digital transformation is an imperative for business today, and we are making our customers’ journey easier and faster through adoption of hybrid cloud,” said Dell CEO Michael Dell. “Dell shares a vision with Microsoft that open architectures and simplified cloud management will benefit customers of all sizes, freeing them to focus on their business and not their technology.”

Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, added: “By expanding our longstanding partnership with Dell to offer a truly integrated hybrid cloud, we will make the cloud more accessible to organisations of all sizes with the choice and flexibility to best meet their needs.”

Dell has made several other related announcements at the event. The computer giant has joined the Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider Program to provide better customer service capabilities and will sell Microsoft cloud products across Azure, Microsoft’s Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS) and Office 365, while also announcing Cloud Flex Pay, a flexible solution available for the Dell hybrid cloud system which gives customers cost-risk payment options.

Recent analyst research shows the comparative positions of Microsoft and Dell in their respective markets. Synergy Research figures in recent quarters show Microsoft carving out a niche in second place in the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market – yet still miles behind Amazon Web Services – while IDC numbers from July saw Dell in second place for cloud infrastructure providers, behind HP but ahead of Cisco.

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Service providers expect a significant growth in the desktop as a service (DaaS) market, according to the latest research from Citrix.

The 2015 Global DaaS Market Survey, which polled more than 500 Citrix service providers in 40 countries, shows service provider partners predict a 71% growth in DaaS, while the adoption of public cloud is set to account for half of cloud adoption for DaaS in 2016. Naturally, adoption of desktop as a service through hosted or co-located data centres will be at the same level, but down from 79% today.

The sector is maturing with providers expanding into different solutions, the research notes. While almost half (49%) of providers offer complete workspaces as part of the desktop as a service model, other offerings are on the table, including mobile device management (34%), file share and sync (29%), and cloud VDI (22%). Despite that, vertical focus is predominantly driving business growth, with finance, manufacturing, and healthcare cited.

John Carey, senior director of worldwide channel programs strategy at Citrix, noted in a blog post: “The 2015 survey showed growth in service providers offering this complete desktops as a service approach, but also new trends in hosted mobile device management, file share and sync, plus hosted networking. This is exciting for Citrix and our partners as we continue to develop and enhance the secure mobile workspace technologies that benefit people, wherever they choose to work.”

The evolution of desktop as a service, as well as virtual desktop infrastructure, has been an interesting one in recent months and years. Many industry players argue DaaS could succeed where VDI has failed; not least in terms of reduced cost, essentially renting equipment from the cloud provider rather than putting together a costly on-prem VDI deployment.

At the back end of 2014, NaviSite’s group vice president and general manager Sumeet Sabharwal explained in a company blog post how maturation of technology, expansion of the provider landscape, and expansion of endpoint devices has helped create a perfect storm for desktop as a service going into 2015.

Speaking to this reporter in March, Sabharwal explained how aiming the technology at specific workloads has improved the situation; however issues such as image management, desktop engineering and Active Directory integration means the service is “not child’s play.”